With the increasing complexity of commercial organizations, industry is seeking to track the location and use of inventory and equipment with increasing specificity and detail. Accordingly, various industries are turning to asset tracking systems that include electronically readable identification tags.
In particular, the information technology industry has particular interest in tracking information technology assets in data centers, particularly those disposed in equipment racks. Conventionally, such assets have been bar coded and manually scanned, requiring frequent and expensive manual data collection in order to maintain inventory and locate moved assets.
More recently, passive radio frequency identification techniques have been used, placing passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on the front of assets and either installing permanent RFID readers in the racks or manually visiting each rack with the scanner and opening and sweeping the scanner over the rack to find assets. However, installation of permanent readers has proven unreliable and expensive because cables and other minor obstructions interfere with the ability to read such tags. In addition, manual scanning using handheld RFID readers has ultimately proven of little value versus traditional bar code methods since it still requires a human visit to each location.
As such, an improved system and method for tracking assets, particularly information technology assets located in rack-based systems would be desirable.
The use of the same reference symbols in different drawings indicates similar or identical items.